Mike Digman

Its easy to see from Mike's resume that he is a talented and experienced engineer capable of tackling the grittiest and most difficult of interface, UX, or hardware challenges. In my experience as Mike's manager, there was never an engineering problem he was given (or found to tackle!) he could not solve. However, consummate technologist is not the end of the story here. Mike's talents extend beyond just interface implementation and engineering. He has all the skills of a truly well rounded engineer and prototyper.

On one of our more recent projects, Mike not only dug deeply into the Bluetooth stack to understand the in's and out's of the protocol, he also communicated complications and restrictions effectively to a cross-functional team of UX, PM, and engineering. Mike is a true bridge builder.

Mike is an educator capable of raising the bar of everyone around him. He realized that one of the things holding back pixel perfect implementations on Android Auto was a lack of understanding of the underlying Android framework by the VisD team. He came at it with a multi-pronged approach of tutoring, talks, and tools. The end result? A more educated team, better cross team collaboration.

Mike cares about the user, no matter how mundane or "unsolvable" the problem. He has gone after low level stream controls, Bluetooth pairing, other things that have fallen by the wayside because user's have either gotten used to the bad experience, or its not "new" enough to be a desirable project.

I would absolutely hire Mike to my team again at any point.

I worked with Mike in the Think Tank Team at Samsung Research America for approximately two years and managed him directly for one. While the Think Tank Team is full of talented, hard-working, and creative individuals, even in that group Mike’s energy, enthusiasm, and creativity stood out.

When I first started working with Mike he’d mainly been working on hardware prototyping and the associated lower-level software; he hadn’t had much experience prototyping user interfaces. It’s a testament to Mike’s talent and hard-work that by the end of a year working with him he’d become one of the best interface prototypers I’d worked with. You could give him a basic idea of how an interface might work, and he’d quickly return with an initial prototype and would have explored several potential improvements to the design. He also regularly brought ideas for new designs to our discussions, and he was always incorporating feedback and suggestions into his thinking to become better at designing interfaces and interactions.

One particular episode from my time working with Mike always springs to mind. It was somewhat early in the period I managed him, and we were walking back from lunch off campus, He was showing me an interface design detail in a 3rd party app that he really liked, and he talked about how he’d been working in his free time to explore how they’d implemented it out of sheer intellectual curiosity. That single episode demonstrates his eye for and appreciation of the small details in user interfaces, his technical ability to determine how to bring those details to life, his curiosity and willingness to learn, and his energy and enthusiasm for creating compelling user interfaces.

If you’re looking for someone to help you build new and compelling user interfaces, Mike is your man. I’d bring him on my team again without hesitation.